The writer and illustrator who produced Dogger
Shirley Hughes 1927-2022
One of Britain’s best-loved children’s writers and illustrators, Shirley Hughes specialised in warm but unsentimental stories of ordinary family life.
In her instantly recognisable style, she drew cheerfully dishevelled children in hand-medown clothing, windy walks in urban parks, harassed mothers pushing laden buggies, neighbours chatting on doorsteps. The best known of her richly illustrated books was probably 1977’s Dogger, said The New York Times, a quotidian drama about a little boy named Dave, whose beloved stuffed toy is lost when he is distracted by a school fair, and the prospect of an ice cream. There are several twists and turns before Dave and Dogger are finally reunited, thanks to the kindness and selfsacrifice of Dave’s older sister Bella. In 2007, it was named the “Greenaway of Greenaways”, following a public vote to find the most popular of half a century of Kate Greenaway medal-winners. Her most recent book was a sequel, Dogger’s Christmas, published in late 2020 when she was 92.
Shirley Hughes was born in 1927, in West Kirby, Merseyside. Her father, TJ Hughes, owned the eponymous Liverpool department store; he died when Shirley was five, reportedly by suicide, leaving his wife Kathleen to bring up their three daughters. Their home was in the comfortable suburbs, but as a child Shirley was often taken to the theatre in Liverpool, where she was distressed by the poverty and the sense of social unrest. She recalled seeing children who’d lost their teeth to rickets; and a man selling bricks from a barrow, for people to throw through the windows of Irish people.
The family remained on the Wirral through the War, and during those years of bombings, blackouts and intense boredom, Shirley and her sisters amused themselves by making up stories and putting on plays. Aged 17, she went to Liverpool School of Art, where she studied costume design. Then, eager to escape a life that revolved around “mock Tudor houses and the tennis club”, she moved to Oxford to study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. Her ambition was to become a set designer and, on graduating, she took a job at Birmingham Rep. She found that the theatre world was not for her; but when she started working as an illustrator, it dawned on her “that the page could be my stage set”. Her own favourite illustrators included Arthur Rackham and E.H. Shepard.
Hughes loved sketching and spent a lot of time observing children to note how they expressed their feelings in their movements – whether joy, sadness or anxiety. She would record, for instance, how a left-out child stood, as the others played around them. In 1952, she was asked to illustrate Dorothy Edwards’ book My
Naughty Little Sister, said The Times, and she captured so beautifully “the body language of a grumpy little girl” that Noel Streatfeild sought her out to illustrate her novel The Bell Family. It was only in 1960 that she found the courage to propose a book of her own,
Lucy and Tom’s Day; but none of her books sold very well until Dogger, by which time she was almost 50. It was inspired by an incident years earlier in her own family. Her son Ed had lost his teddy bear in a park near their home in London’s Notting Hill and had been so distraught, Hughes’ husband, architect John Vulliamy, had climbed over the fence after dark in an effort to retrieve it. Ed’s bear was never found; but in 1959, Ed was given for Christmas a stuffed dog called Dogger, which was never lost – and which has been displayed at the Ashmolean.
Dogger was an international success, and she followed it up with the similarly popular Alfie Gets in First, which became the first in a series. Later, she wrote books for older children, including
Whistling in the Dark, set in Liverpool during the Blitz. In 2018, she told an interviewer that she had no plans to stop work; writing for children is what “I was put on this Earth to do”.